Fabrication and characteristic of long photonic crystal fiber taper

In this paper, we drew a 500 m-long PCF taper directly on the industry drawing tower. The fiber taper has a uniform cross-section structure with OD from 170 μm to 70 μm, and demonstrates very good beam quality. The optical attenuation of PCF taper was measured. The optical attenuation is ∼5 dB/km near 1200 nm, but the water absorption peak around 1400 nm and the attenuation beyond 1600 nm are still large. The zero dispersion wavelength (ZDW) was calculated to be ∼1090 nm at the taper input end, and shifted to ∼870 nm at the taper output end. The PCF taper was pumped with a picosecond laser source at wavelength of 1064 nm, and generated 200 mW output power of SC covering from ∼450 nm to 1600 nm. © 2012 SPIE.